Authors: Dana Marton
“
No.” The denial came between two gasps.
“
What then?”
Her hands fell away, and she looked up at him, the desperation on her face gut-wrenching. “I don’t know.” Tears filled her eyes all over again. She blinked them furiously away.
A woman on the brink of falling apart.
Good.
Suspects usually told the truth when they came unhinged. Time to push harder.
“
What is Blackwell to you?” he challenged. “Are you willing to go to prison for him? Is he your boyfriend?” While the idea of DaRosa’s hands on her had angered him, the idea of Blackwell’s hands on her disturbed him on a deeper level. “Is he worth a charge of accessory to murder? Is he that good a fuck?”
Her eyes widened with shock, and she recoiled from him as if he’d physically struck her. If her reaction made him feel like a bastard, he wasn’t willing to acknowledge it.
“
I don’t know him,” she protested in a voice filled with despair.
“
So you just saw me in your mind?”
She nodded.
Judging by the look in her eyes, she hated him as much at this moment as he hated Blackwell. She was welcome to it. “And?”
“
I recognized the rock and the creek. I knew where you were.”
* * *
Jack Sullivan thought she was in league with a serial killer. And, stupidly, to convince him she was innocent, she had blurted out her darkest secret.
Oh God.
She would have done anything to undo that, to erase her words.
Soon everyone would know that something was seriously wrong with her. And then she would never get her daughter back. She wrapped her arms tightly around herself, dizzy with the anxiety and anger that gripped her.
She had to make Sullivan believe her, accept that she had nothing to do with the killer he was looking for. He seemed dead set on pinning a slew of murders on her.
Or accessory to murder.
Nausea bubbled in her stomach. She squeezed her eyes shut for a second.
To think that she’d been scared of Bing. For Bing, the case was a job. For Sullivan, it was personal. He was aggressive and crass and relentless and—
“
Have you tried to find any of the others?” He glanced back at the pictures, then at her again, his face hard, his eyes narrowed. He had a look of emptiness about him, as if he’d left his soul in that grave and brought only the darkness with him. He had no right to bring that to her house.
She wanted to curl up into a ball and howl with the unfairness of it all. “I didn’t know where the others were. Only you. And I knew you weren’t dead.”
“
How?”
She pointed at the painting with a frustrated gesture. It was so obvious. How could he not see it?
He picked up the painting, looked at it for a few seconds; then he looked at the rest of the canvases. “I don’t look like the others.” He paused. “Why did you come?”
If only she hadn’t. She’d been scared out of her mind. “I thought…”
He waited her out.
“
I thought if I saved you, maybe I wouldn’t see another…vision, ever again.” She had expected relief, some sort of absolution and an end to the nightmare that had kept her bound for over a year now. Instead, she’d gotten Jack Sullivan with all his disapproval and suspicions, and his ability to reach to the deepest, darkest core of her.
He kept his face inscrutable, leaving her no way to tell if he believed anything she told him.
She
wouldn’t believe it if it wasn’t happening to her.
The first time she had painted a lifeless body, she’d thought it some sort of a fluke, another symptom of the depression that had followed the accident on the reservoir. The landscape she’d planned on painting kept changing as she was compelled to change the location of the trees, add a road, take out the barn she’d meant to have as the focal point. She’d painted that first body, an older woman, in a trance, horrified when she’d stepped back at the end.
After the second time it’d happened, a black teenager, she packed up her paints and canvases and decided not to paint for a while until whatever was going on in her mind blew over. Her shrink upped her antidepressant. It didn’t help, made her slightly manic, keeping her up night after night with nothing to do.
The third body she’d seen in her mind, a man in a UPS uniform, she’d been determined not to paint. But her hands moved on their own, dragging out her supplies. She’d been terrified enough after that to throw the rest of her blank canvases and paint tubes into the trash.
When the image of the fourth body invaded her thoughts, she’d been forced to paint on the back of an old kitchen cabinet with leftover household paints. After that, she’d accepted that she couldn’t fight the curse and no longer tossed the odd canvases friends brought by or the paint and brush samples sent by companies she’d frequently ordered from in the past.
When the next terrible urge came, she simply painted the young woman, Megan Keeler, the first who had a name. Ashley had recognized her in the Inquirer a few days later.
Missing College Student’s Body Found in Southeastern PA.
She’d thrown up twice before she could finish the article.
With the next victims, she searched the papers obsessively until she found them. She didn’t dare go to the police. What help could she be? They were already all dead. What could she say?
I paint dead people?
The man with the cerulean-blue eyes, Detective Jack Sullivan, had been her ninth.
She was
not
going crazy. There had to be a way out of this. She would find it.
“
When did it start?” he demanded.
God, not that. She couldn’t go back to Dylan. But looking at the man’s face, she finally understood that she wasn’t going to get a choice. “An accident happened on the reservoir.”
He nodded.
Did he know about that? Of course he did; everyone around here knew the whole sordid tale.
“
We fell through the ice, Maddie and Dylan and I.” She rubbed her hands over her arms, feeling the deadly chill all over again. “I was under for twenty minutes, but they pulled me out and revived me. I was in a coma for a week.”
The cold water had slowed down her metabolism to the point where she didn’t suffer any brain damage from the lack of oxygen, the doctors had explained later, declaring her a medical miracle.
“
And after that—” It killed her to have to think back to the accusations, the tremendous guilt, the depression.
The Millers, her neighbors, had lost Dylan. But she had lost her daughter too. Her father had taken Maddie while Ashley had been in the hospital. And considering the state she’d been in even after she’d gotten out, he’d been reluctant to give Maddie back.
She wanted her daughter more than she wanted anything. But she was scared to the bone that there was something seriously wrong with her, that she was going crazy, that she would never get better, would never get Maddie back, would end up dying in a mental hospital like her mother, strapped to the bed.
None of which she could share with anyone, not ever.
All she could give Jack Sullivan was the most basic truth, which he had already seen and had refused to believe. “And now I paint the dead.”
~~~***~~~
Chapter Four
Jack smashed his fist into the boxing bag, the sharp slap the only sound that broke the silence in the small workout room in the back of the police station. The gym was utilitarian, nothing but the basics. He didn’t need much. He just needed a place to build his body back.
He lost himself in the rhythm of his punches. He liked it when he was alone in here. He was still on leave—not by his own choice—but he could at least use the gym, part of his physical therapy. Maybe he was doing it a little harder than he was supposed to, but he didn’t have time for a slow recovery.
So he came in, once a day, for the gym, and because he could usually sneak a few minutes at his computer, check on things, ask around about what progress the FBI was making.
None whatsoever.
Pretty much the same as he. His home visit a week ago with Ashley Price had netted more questions than answers.
He’d spent the intervening days with identifying everybody on the paintings he’d taken from her. Other than himself, he couldn’t find a single link to Blackwell.
Punch, right, left. Forearms, right, left. Elbows, right, left. Knees, right, left. He exhaled sharply on each blow. He was focused on the bag, but not as deeply as he would have liked to be.
What did he know about her for sure?
She painted the dead.
People who died violently, to be more specific. Ashley Price, an untimely death, and geographical proximity were all the victims in her paintings had in common. Somebody coming in fresh and looking at those facts would have theorized that she was one of the rare female serial killers.
Except, he’d met her, and she wasn’t a killer. She was a mess. And she hadn’t been the one who’d put him into the grave.
But she
was
the one who’d dug him up.
He’d be damned if he knew what that meant.
He was almost puzzled enough to seriously consider her psychic tale. Almost.
Punch, right, left. Forearms, right, left. Elbows, right, left. Knees, right, left.
Maybe the FBI could make more sense of her. The four agents who’d arrived had taken over the single conference room at the police station and one of the offices. Bing wouldn’t let Jack near them. But even if he had, Jack wouldn’t have handed over the paintings. Ashley was
his
lead.
He
wanted to be the one who found Blackwell, dammit.
He danced around the bag, working it over as it swung on the chain. Left, right, back, forth. Everything hurt. He thought he’d learned long ago to shut out pain, both emotional and physical. Not quite.
Time to burn that pain out of his muscles. With every hit, he imagined Blackwell, let himself feel just enough to create a controlled flame burning in the dark. The sick bastard had left him alive even as he’d buried him, left him to die slowly so he would have time to think about how badly he’d failed.
The faces of Blackwell’s other known victims played through his mind like a film on an endless loop, each one of the eighteen crying out for revenge. North Carolina, Virginia, Maryland, New Jersey, New York, Long Island, Connecticut. He’d made it his career to follow Blackwell up and down the East Coast, transferring from department to department over the years.
After a triple murder in Baltimore, he’d picked up on something in a forensics report the FBI had missed—spores at a crime scene, from some gourmet mushroom produced in only a half-dozen places in the country. He’d put six brown pins in the map on his wall at his rental, one for each location.
The line of eighteen red pins that marked the victims all concentrated in the middle section of the East Coast. The six brown ones were distributed randomly over the US, only one on the East Coast, Broslin, PA, in the middle of all the red. A state surrounded by victim states but where no victim had been taken.
Why? Because it would have hit too close to home for Blackwell?
So Jack took the first police job that came up in Broslin and had been damn proud of himself for getting another step closer. Except now it seemed Blackwell had caught on. The bastard had trapped him and nearly killed him.
Nearly
.
His turn. But he couldn’t let his revenge blind him. Every move had to be carefully calculated. They were in the endgame.
Jab. Cross. Elbow. Uppercut. Jack let the force of his legs explode through his hips, torso, and shoulders, sent the energy through his arms and into the bag.
Only when he was completely spent, covered in sweat, did he let himself drop to the mat. But even then, he couldn’t rest. He reached for his phone and shuffled through the photos he’d taken of Ashley’s bizarre paintings. He paused the screen at the painting of himself in the grave, eyes open but unseeing.
Blackwell’s other known victims hadn’t been buried alive. They’d been buried in pieces. The FBI had never done a full recovery. The bastard was keeping trophies.
But he hadn’t cut Jack. Why? Why bury him alive?
He pushed back his rising anger. You go into a fight hot, you've already lost—one of the fundamental rules of combat he’d learned early on. He withdrew to the darkroom in his mind, as always when emotions threatened to get in his way. He liked the black, hollow space that let in no light. Except this time he wasn’t alone. He’d somehow carried Ashley Price in there with him.
The woman carried a load of guilt, grief, and despair, along with some pretty dark secrets. They had that in common.
Hot as all get-out, but a basket case. Then again, anyone who would hook up with Blackwell had to be seriously messed up. He sure as hell didn’t believe the psychic-vision bullshit. She was with Blackwell—either coerced or by choice. Probably the latter.